Zoe Kazan’s spark is aglow all over as her debut lead role
and screenplay “Ruby Sparks” continuously merit positive and rave reviews since
it recently opened in the U.S. More than ripe and timely for reaping
movie audience internationally looking for a new kind of high in romantic
movies.
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| Photo courtesy of 20th Century Fox |
In the enchanting, reflective and very funny “Ruby Sparks,” Paul Dano plays
Calvin, a brilliant young writer who dazzled the literary world a decade ago
when he was a young student. His first novel was greeted with accolades and
awards. But since penning that book, he has failed to live up to
expectations and that early promise. He hasn’t written anything for a decade.
Life changes one sunny California day when Calvin wills the perfect woman into
his life by the sheer power of his imagination. Ruby (Zoe Kazan) leaps off the
page and into the kitchen of his house, filling it with her warm and joyful
personality. But Calvin will have to decide soon what awaits Ruby at the end of
his story.
It began with an idea that struck Zoe Kazan nearly as suddenly as Calvin comes
up with Ruby Sparks. Kazan – renowned as a promising playwright and a
rising actress with roles in “Revolutionary Road,” “It’s Complicated” and the
indie Western “Meek’s Cutoff” – was coming home late one night from the set of
a film when she was shocked to see a mannequin lying in heap of trash.
The sight set off a creative chain reaction as Kazan, a Greek mythology buff,
was reminded of the ancient myth of Galatea, in which Pygmalion falls in love
with the statue he has crafted with his own hands. That uncanny moment,
when the inanimate seemed to come alive, started her thinking about how
fantasy, autonomy and identity collide and collude in contemporary
relationships.
Zoe Kazan might have created all the tricky layers of Ruby Sparks on the page
but doing the same thing as an actress was a completely different
challenge. “As Ruby, Zoe had to become the heart of the movie,” notes
producer Ron Yerxa, “Zoe plays her as a free-spirited, autonomous young
woman. Ruby had a punk past and she’s now an artist. She’s sexy and
attractive, but she very much has her own mind.”
For Kazan, it was exciting to explore a character who naturally mirrors some of
her own creative outlook but who is in other ways decidedly unlike
herself. “I gave Ruby some qualities that I probably possess, but she’s
also very different,” Kazan explains. “I like to be taken care of and
Ruby’s much more independent. She likes to speak her mind. She’s very
brave that way. It was always important to me that she not seem at all
like a dream girl, but very real, so the challenge was in figuring out how to
do that.”
As Kazan wrote, she began sharing
her work with her boyfriend, the actor Paul Dano, and though she had not set
out to write something for the two of them, they couldn’t help but envision one
another in the lead roles. “I think I was always subconsciously
writing Calvin for Paul,” she muses. “But the weirdest thing is that I was
writing a character who is writing my character! There was something very
meta going on.”
She explains: “I was
interested in the theme of control in relationships and the way we bring in
ideas of who the person we love should be. How do you love the person
you’re with completely without saying ‘I don’t want this part or that
part?’ How do you make room in a relationship for two separate people?
I’ve been in relationships before where I felt like the person was not seeing
me, but something close to me, something just a little off center from me. That
is what happens with Calvin and Ruby.”
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